This is last week's Campaign thing. I was a bit nervous about this one. I had to write it more than a week before it appeared, and when you're writing about a blog who knows what can happen in the meantime. Fortunately I don't think Innocent have taken the blog down or been bought by BP or anything.
Here's the thing:
Scary management consultants Bain recently added blogs to their survey of management tools, describing some of their uses like this; " Blogs can create product communities that increase customer loyalty...Feedback from customers about new products and services can help companies develop a rapid response to problems... CEO bloggers provide customers with direct access to top management". As with so much that management consultants do, they've captured the essence of the idea while simultaneously kicking all the life out of it. But if you want to see a live example of a blog being used just like this, and really well, have a look at innocentdrinks.co.uk and have a read of the conversation that's going on about their current trial with McDonald's. It's a case study in the optimal deployment of a leading-edge customer-relationship methodology. (As management consultants might say.)
The first great thing about it; the channel actually exists. There's a direct, live channel right there on the Innocent website that can host the conversation, un-mediated by anyone else. Just looking at the Innocent/McDonald's debate unfold in the mainstream media you can see how brands are hostages to the whims of journalistic shortcuts. Most people reading newspaper coverage of this stuff will just see the words Innocent and McDonald's in the same headline and jump to immediate and erroneous conclusions. At least on their own blog Innocent can put their case exactly as they want to, they don't have to hope the contents of a press release will squeeze through the media. And their openness and honesty will probably win them fans even with people who don't like their final decision.
Secondly, while conventional market research can be incredibly distancing and abstract, there's something very visceral and clarifying about the way people comment on your blog. They write exactly what they want to say and you confront it with no filter. It's the difference between hearing what people say in a focus group and having them come round your house to say it. I therefore suspect that, rightly or wrongly, the views of the few hundred people who might end up commenting on the blog will heavily outweigh the market research Innocent did. Someone expressing themselves forcefully, in their own words, under their own name, inevitably gives you more to think about than knowing that X% of people somewhat approve or disapprove of something.
Social media tools like blogs are new for most of us, and some of us will never get past the fact that blogger sounds a bit like bugger, but people like Innocent are demonstrating their power, not just as effective comms tools but as ways of putting some humanity back into the way we talk with our customers. It's worth having a look.
This is a great piece.
Management consultants…..ahem.
I agree that blogging commentary can be visceral, often instinctive and directly reflective of people's true opinions. But I am certain that in many cases people's comments are heavily influenced by the fact that the sum total of their blogging commentary effectively forms their external identity in the digital world. It’s how we form our opinions about others, opinions that turn into reputations, reputations that decide people’s career progression. Ad people and wannabe ad people are acutely aware of this. I think we all to varying degrees have pretty strong opinions about a lot of people we haven’t even met in real life…only in the blogsphere. That’s both good and bad…I think.
And because you are a well known, brilliantly clever and highly respected planner – someone most people would naturally like to work with - I intuit you get a disproportionate amount of positive feedback on your blog. It’s not that you don’t deserve it, you definitely do, but I think people with opposing, non-concurring views (at least from planners and wannabe planners) often prefer to hold their piece.
Generally speaking (provided the relationship between the blog writer and the “commentator” is balanced and no direct dependency is involved), I think a vast majority of people are more likely to write concurring opinions on blogs than non-concurring ones. It’s just part of human nature to look for commonalities/similarities with other individuals on which to forge mutually beneficial bonds within the herd. And I think that’s particularly true for the planning herd.
That said, I guarantee this is a truly visceral comment ;-)
Posted by: fredrik sarnblad | May 24, 2007 at 06:01 AM